The Word "Smart": A Few Thoughts

The usage of the word "smart" has long seemed to me unsatisfactory as a descriptor of the powers of an individual human mind. If "smart" seems to be defined in the dictionaries I have checked as a synonym for "intelligent," people seem to use it rather less precisely than they do "intelligence" and its derivatives, often also using it to refer to "knowledge" or "skills"--obviously a different matter than "intelligence." Even the most intelligent person, after all, does not know what they have not learned. One may imagine that they would, all other things being equal, learn the knowledge or skill at issue more quickly and master it more fully if given the chance than someone who is less "intelligent," but the point is that not given the chance they simply do not have that knowledge or those skills. They are no less intelligent for that. But they may be considered less "smart" for that, a view which bespeaks considerable muddle regarding the concept of "smartness" generally, which seems to me to be compounded by the lower-level muddle characteristic of our speaking of those things which make up "smartness." (Consider our debates about "generative artificial intelligence," and the skeptic's charge that all it does is gather material from its surroundings and slice and dice and recombine it to give us what it does. Are we really so sure that this isn't exactly what humans do when they "create?")

Making matters worse is the way in which intelligence and smartness and the rest, quite frankly, for all the pretenses of modernity and science, of standardized testing and technocracy, is generally understood by the layperson in those terms Thorstein Veblen would have characterized as barbaric--as a matter of personal prowess and force, with reference to said prowess, said force, supposed to explain everything else. The imprecision, and invidiousness, of the use of the word "smart" in particular are all too consistent with this, and consistent too with what is inseparable from all of them, the constant, strident, use of claims to superior intelligence as a justification for inequality--in our time extreme, ever-increasing, ever-more brutal inequality favoring an elite second to none in all of human history for its stupidity, viciousness, gracelessness. Altogether that muddle and barbarism, that conformism and meanness, make the use of the word "smart," like so much else, all too redolent of exploitation of the the stupid person's grasp of the concept of intelligence for the vicious ends of those intent on upholding the status quo in our time.